Going with the flow…

There are times when a halt ought to be called on a project to avoid any agony being prolonged, in this case it is the electrics on my Triumph. Early on in this project I decided to see if it could be done on as small a budget as possible, my reasoning being there are more of us out there who don’t have an unlimited budget than those who do, especially given the current situation.

There have been Triumph bits piling up in my workshop or various workshops to be honest, for 40 years, and I felt confident of putting them all together in a working motorcycle, which wouldn’t be original but would work.

Rather than chucking money at it and acquiring an electronic ignition I wondered if the distributor was as bad as folklore would have it. This determined a course of action, and a search through all the electrical bits I have. There are three alternators, several coils, three capacitors, three rectifiers and a distributor which was in the engine originally.

More to satisfy my own curiosity than for any real intention of it being a permanent source of electrical power, I set to and attached the required bits and pieces to the bike.

At first this was done roughly to sort out where everything will go and what I’d need to find to fit them more securely. Now, the routing of electricity from the spinny roundy thing on the end of the crankshaft to the bit that sticks in the engine has to go via certain components which convert the current from alternating to direct.

I’m probably not alone in having an attack of the vapours when looking at wiring diagrams, or maybe I just don’t have the type of brain which can sort which bit